Tag: SQL

In case you missed it, last week a new SQL Azure website went up at http://www.microsoft.com/sqlazure/. Some of the new content includes a page with SQL Azure videos and a Community page to keep you up-to-date on what’s happening. Enjoy!

I was recently talking about optimistic and pessimistic concurrency. That got me thinking about one of the most popular protocols around: HTTP. While HTTP doesn’t refer to this in as many words, it does in fact have support for an optimistic concurrency system. This is based around entity tags, which are values that can be…

I remember that this was a tricky thing for me to understand and remember when I first got started with databases, so I thought I might help someone out by explaining these in a simple way. Optimistic and pessimistic locking (or concurrency control) are ways of addressing a problem such as the following: User A…

I’d like to start by making sure everyone knows that the Microsoft TechEd sessions are available online. There is some great content that is definitely worth checking out. Today, I’d like to highlight the talk on the T-SQL OVER Clause presented by Adam Machanic. Sure, you can always go to the reference page on MSDN,…

In yesterday’s post, I hinted at a method to improve memory usage in your applications. This trick can be applied anytime you have many strings in your application that have the same value but were allocated separately and thus each take up space of their own. This is something that you may find whenever you’re…

The other day, a question popped up on the forums about whether the DataSet, by virtue of not being able to “spill to disk” intelligently like a database engine can, was inappropriate for some specific scenario. That got me thinking about how much memory the component consumes, one thing led to another, and so here…

Go find out all the goodness of the release at http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2.aspx My personal favorite? Self-service business intelligence. Anything that empowers end-users is a win for me, and this one simultaneously gives IT more oversight and control of what’s happening with the data that runs their business. Enjoy!

If you’re still developing new code using typed DataSet, you may have run into the situation where you want to read connection information at runtime, maybe from a centralized configuration file, or perhaps by simply asking the user. The place where the connection information comes into place is in the generated table adapters. The adapters…

If you’re working with the DataSet class and loading and saving data in XML format, you may have run into a bit of a surprise. Even when you specifically read an XSD schema into your DataSet, when you load data into it, it seems that validation doesn’t work – you’re still able to pass in…

As mentioned in the SQL Server Support Blog, you may find an issue installing SQL Server 2005 if you install MSXML Core Services 6.0 Service Pack 2 on Windows XP SP2, then upgrade to Windows XP SP3, then try the SQL install. Check out that post for more details, along with the KB for the…